This invention relates to grass or lawn maintenance equipment. More particularly, this invention relates to an aerator blade and a turf aerator.
Lawn or turf maintenance often includes the application of dry and liquid materials including seed, fertilizer, and pesticides, as well as mechanical processes including mowing and aerating. Aeration is a process of penetrating the thatch that overlies turf, penetrating the turf itself and finally penetrating the underlying soil to provide a passageway through which air, water and fertilizer can pass into the soil. Aeration is known to be beneficial to turf in that it reduces diseases and thatch buildup and allows air and water to penetrate into the soil. There are two known methods of aerating the turf. One is called plug aeration which it removes plugs of turf and soil and the other is spike aeration where the spikes only penetrate through the turf and into the soil.
One problem with the known methods of aerating turf is that the process of plug aeration leaves conspicuous and unsightly plugs of thatch, turf and soil on the turf surface. The other known method of spike aeration compacts the soil beneath and around the hole-forming spikes and over time, the process of aerating soil by spike aeration can actually exacerbate the soil compaction problem that aerating was supposed to cure. A turf aerator that does not compact underlying soil and which does not create unsightly plugs would be an improvement over the prior art.